New 2TB hdd on sale in UK

[Mighty God]

Thats interesting. If they can drop to £150 over the next couple of months I'd be happy

Yeah so would I, I would like to see them drop below £200 at least shortly, but I don't think I'll buy one until they come below £150 though. I'm definitely watching out for any sites having promotions on these, however I know this isn't very likely what with the economy and everything.

[Mighty God]

Having said all what I have, WD's Green 1TB's are still good value at the minute and would provide a little better performance over 2 drives as they are 2 physical drives, but even these have risen in price in recent months though! However did manage to get one of these for around £75 in the summer (2008) from http://www.aria.co.uk/ on a super special offer! P

[Singh400]

scan is selling the new 2tb monsters.

It's a western digital wd20eads caviar green with 32mb cache. The price at the moment is 258£ which is obscene (it costs 3 times more than a 1tb spinpoint for example). It's also not in stock at the moment but you can preorder.

Anyone has any experience with these monsters, or intends to buy any?

Bout time. But I wanna see Samsung F1s 2TB!

Why do you need 15 TB of disk Funkstar? You running a Pr0n server?...

Home/media server.

Funkstar: What do you use to store your HD? I am a bit of a space hog myself, though I've resisted the urge of buying many HD because I am not sure what is the best way to stack them once I fill my case up. Going external would be a pain because of the number of cables and power sockets required.

I am curious about NAS box, but they don't seem cheap, and I've yet to set one up. Furthermore, I can't change the router settings in anyway since it's not mine and the landlord probably wouldn't want me to mess about with it.

Thanks.

Build your own NAS/WHS box. I've got space for atleast 3 more hdd in mine, before I have to look at another case.

[Maccer101]

What is the platter count in a 2tb drive, have they managed 500gb per platter then?

[Funkstar]

What is the platter count in a 2tb drive, have they managed 500gb per platter then?

Yes. There are 4 platters.

[Maccer101]

Yes. There are 4 platters.

Wow....

[rs4847]

2tb is all well and good, hope these new platters endup in 500gb, 1tb and 1.5tb and of course 2tb black and blue WD drives.

[Funkstar]

2tb is all well and good, hope these new platters endup in 500gb, 1tb and 1.5tb and of course 2tb black and blue WD drives.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576

There are 1.5TB and 1TB variants on their way too. It probably would be worth their time with a 500GB drive.

The 16MB cache version use either 350GB or 320GB platters.

[TooNice]

How much would a cost effective NAS box set me back (without any drives), and do they need any special permission from the router to function as intended?

[Funkstar]

You don't need to touch the router at all, they are just a little PC that is dedicated to serving files.

Cost effective and NAS boxes don't really go hand in hand. Have a look at Scan, they have a selection. From basic singles drive solutions, right up to 8 drive monsters.

[Mighty God]

Before I carry out some intense research - lol, I thought I'd ask if anyone knows where the cheapest WD 2TB Green HDD is for sale?

[Funkstar]

You'll struggle to find any in stock right now.

In the past couple of weeks they have been on pre-order, the prices have gone from around £206 to £258. I would really recomend waiting until plenty of places have stock and prices have settled a little. I suspect £258 is list price and not a great reflection on their realistic street price.

edit cheapest I can see is £211, wouldn't trust it though.Dabs is £245, Scan is £244 which is already £14 less than the start of this week.

http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=W...tf-8&scoring=p

[TooNice]

Two more questions on NAS:

- I don't quite understand why they are as expensive as they are even without drives. Sorry for the newbie question, but what can the £500-1000+ do that you couldn't with a cheap-ish desktop?

- How fast evolving are NAS boxes? Are they investment that you can keep for years like a good monitor, or are they relatively fast depreciating, rapidly developing hardware like GFX cards?

[Funkstar]

- I don't quite understand why they are as expensive as they are even without drives. Sorry for the newbie question, but what can the £500-1000+ do that you couldn't with a cheap-ish desktop?

Mainly it's because of development time and support. They are appliances, so are supported as such. If you build a PC you get supports on those parts, but you won't get support on running it as an actual NAS box.

Yes you can build a big box PC for a lot less than a 5+ drive NAS box and it will be a lot more powerful too. However, it will be a lot larger. I've looked into building something like an N5200 and you can't even get close, no-one sells a case with 5 hot swap cages and space for a mini-ITX board. Steve B has also looked into this. It would also be a challenge to put a system tegether with 5 SATA ports for the RAID and nother SATA or ISE port for the OS. The N5200 uses a flash disk (known as a DOM - Disk On Module) the plugs directly into an IDE socket on the main board. There is also an 8 port SATA controller in there feeding the 5 RAID drives and an external SATA port. I've been looking into RAID cards recently and they are very expensive for a decent one. Granted you can just use a SATA controller and leave the RAID up to software (which is what the N5200 does with MDADM), but anything over 4 ports is hard to find. In fact I couldn'f find any from my usual parts suppliers like Scan and eBuyer. A credible PCIe 8port RAID card is about £240.

It also takes quite a bit of fiddling to get even a specialist linux distro working as smoothly as a Qnap or Thecus box. Granted once you do get it running it is a lot easier to add your own apps and services, but at least with a NAS the standard apps have been tested to make sure they don't interfere with each other.

- How fast evolving are NAS boxes? Are they investment that you can keep for years like a good monitor, or are they relatively fast depreciating, rapidly developing hardware like GFX cards?

NAS boxes aren't as fast moving as other parts of the tech industry. For example my two N5200s are still current even after having them for a year. As they are just little PCs, the software can be updated as much as the vendor wishes. There is usually some form of addon or module support too for the community to add their own functionality.

[iranu]

I was helping the old man sort out all the junk in his study at the weekend. Gonna give it a make over. He came across a receipt from Gateway dated 1995. It was for a 730mb hard drive. Can you guess what the price was? Highlight left of the smilie.

£169

[arthurleung]

Having said all what I have, WD's Green 1TB's are still good value at the minute and would provide a little better performance over 2 drives as they are 2 physical drives, but even these have risen in price in recent months though! However did manage to get one of these for around £75 in the summer (2008) from http://www.aria.co.uk/ on a super special offer! P

Speaking of which I bought 4 1TB RE2-GP a long time ago (think it was over a year), and the price actually went up

1TB Western Digital WD1000FYPS RE2-GP, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms £116.93 £134.47

And still show as a hot seller!

I have two NAS lying around doing nothing. A Promise NS4300N (Veryoisy fan) and Thecus N299 (Hardware bug with drained battery). Probably gonna sell them soon when I have time to unpack and replace that stupid battery.

Funkstar, 8 port software raid is pretty much out of league for "mid-end" NAS. Get a proper barebone and slap in some PERC goodness and you get 400MB/s read/write out of RAID6 for the price cheaper than a N5200. Nowadays I just install a barebone, slap a copy of un-used XP on it, and run administrative shares. I have horrible experience with Japanese/Chinese characters on Linux NAS which corrupts my filenames with incomplete UTF8 support. And best, no need to mess with hacking the NAS to add extra capabilities, no fsck and fragment problem (my CentOS webserver fragments so badly it had to be reinstalled every year to get acceptable performance).